Thirty-nine-year-old historian Charles Beard revolutionized the writing of American history with the 1913 publication of his controversial An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution. Beard argued that the founding fathers were men of considerable property, and acted to protect their wealth from an excess of democracy.

As a choreographer of parade drill teams with the American army in France in 1917 and 1918, Busby Berkeley perfected the crisscrossing precision that moviegoers would come to love.

In 1919 Edward L. Bernays founded the world's first public relations firm. Bernays dispensed advice to clients well after his one hundredth birthday, until his death in 1995.

Cornelia Foster Bradford, the founder of the Whittier Settlement House in Jersey City, New Jersey, became estranged from her eastern European immigrant constituency after 1915 when she took an increasingly nativist stance.

On a business trip in London, Chicago publisher William Boyce lost his way in...